“Connection to Capital”
If you want to become a successful businessman and you don’t have a particularly impressive business model or, really, any sort of easily marketed product, do not despair. It is still easy to get banks to you lend you money and investors to pile on. You only need to do one thing: marry the rich relative of a celebrity. The story of the absolutely, positively unlikely rise of WeWork beyond a couple of drunk guys sitting around and thinking up ridiculous paths to becoming billionaires lies entirely in the guiding principle of those with a “connection to capital” automatically having an advantage that is even more useful than the most brilliant invention of all time. The overarching theme of the book is simple: success is not what you know or even who you know, but how big is the gap between intellect and wealth of who you know. The lower the intellect and the greater the wealth, the better the odds of success.
Trumponomics
This book is the story of Adam Neumann, co-founder of WeWork, and the spectacular rise and collapse of that enterprise. But in telling the story of Neumann during the Trump administration, it becomes a much larger portrait of how men (and women) like Neumann and Trump are identical representatives of not the exception, but the rule to conducting business at the highest echelons of capitalism. The psycho-biography of Neumann reads just like that of Donald Trump: excessively inflated ego, raising money by telling investors what they want to hear instead of actual plans, an education pretty much limited to myriad means of manipulating others to get what you want, and somehow selling sizzle without even buying a steak.
Bankers and Investors are (Dumb) People, Too
Those working at the highest echelon of the system of extending loans and investments to businesses in America are generally held in high esteem for their smarts even as their basic lack of fundamental decency is taken for granted. This common view is revealed as wildly out of sync in the book. Not the decency part, mind you, but the idea that those working at this level are even less prone to con men and scammers. Ultimately, the facts associated with Neumann’s “connection to capital” and the rise of WeWork manifests itself as an embarrassingly revelation: those who fell for the infamous Nigerian prince e-mail swindle are really not in any genuine way more ignorant and gullible than the bankers and investors who fell for Neumann’s swindle.
Everybody Lies
The truth about the world of high finance is that everybody lies. The Prime Minister of India lies to Neumann. Neumann lies to investors. Investors lie to bankers. Bankers lie to everybody. The most appalling aspect of this systemic reliance upon deception and unparalleled resistance to truth and facts is the fostering of an atmosphere in which businessmen from Neumann to Jared Kushner are demonstrated as operating in a bubble of their own self-constructed versions of reality. The inevitable result of conducting business outside the confines of the actual reality that normal people are forced to adhere to is, of course, business-making disasters. Unfortunately, since they are all operating without the same basic lack of reality, those at the top usually do not suffer the consequences of these disasters which are simply passed down the system.
